BBMRI-ERIC stands for Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure – European Research Infrastructure Consortium. It is a European research infrastructure that supports biobanks and biomedical researchers by providing access to high-quality biological samples, data, and services. BBMRI-ERIC facilitates collaboration across European countries to enhance research in personalized medicine, genomics, and other biomedical fields while ensuring compliance with ethical, legal, and social standards.
Cyprus started as an Observer at BBMRI-ERIC in 2016 and became a full member in 2022, with the ambition to constitute a significant node, contribute to European biobanking, and benefit from their participation in the largest family of biobanks in Europe. Research in Cyprus has a relatively short history, but substantial progress has been made in various fields of human molecular and medical genetics.
The main goals are to:
- Establish a strong biobank with optimal operational conditions harmonised with BBMRI-ERIC standards and norms, ensuring full transparency
- Integrate into the medical community and the public sphere, demonstrating respect for ethical, legal, and social implications, in order to facilitate patient and healthy donor enrolment for present and future research on monogenic and complex disorders
- Enhance the biobank’s capacities in order to support research in many more areas and on diseases that remain neglected, while taking advantage of unique genetic phenomena present in the Cypriot gene pool
- Reach a level of maturity that will lead to wider visibility and exploitation of the biobanked material by local and foreign researchers
- Complete the Cyprus human genome project by creating a Cypriot reference genome, which will serve as a baseline for other medical projects applied to separate disease entities
- Develop educational activities to train current and future generations of researchers in the fields of population genetics, molecular epidemiology, and bioinformatics
More on BBMRI-ERIC.cy can be found in the link below:
